Key to book content is a skilled, organised and analytical indexer

A computer could do it, but indexing reference books is really a job for humans, says Moyra Forrest

Today is the first National Indexing Day, timed to celebrate the 60th birthday of the Society of Indexers.

So what is indexing, and who are these indexers?

The index is a concise, wellordered key to the contents of a book. If you skim an index, you should gain a very good idea about the coverage of the text.

Sounds easy? Surely a computer can do that? It is, in fact, skilled work and requires analytical and organisational skills. There is dedicated indexing software which most indexers find invaluable: sorting page numbers into sequence, alphabetising headings. And yet, even there, some of our greyer heads feel a certain thought process has been lost: as you filed manually, you often pondered other relationships in the index. There is some fascinating research on the neurological processes of indexing.

There are some word processing programs that claim to produce an index. However, I have yet to find one that has sufficient sophistication to realise that, for example, Nick Clegg, the MP for Sheffield Hallam, the Liberal Democrat Brexit spokesperson, and the former Deputy Prime Minister, are one and the same person, and all index references to him need to be pulled together.

Sub-headings are also very important. Long strings of page references are very unhelpful, and fail to convey the sophistication of the treatment of some subjects.

Sounds abstruse – surely many of